QUICK THOUGHTS: an ethics of opinions is urgently needed

QUICK THOUGHTS: an ethics of opinions is urgently needed

An invisible but extraordinarily powerful event has imposed itself in recent decades: the irrational has overflowed the banks of its harmless course. Bad thought is rampant, the reluctance to rely on evidence rather than on messy information quickly taken here and there, in the confused world of information overdose, is spreading more and more. The daredevils of the confusion between true and false triumph, immovable malthinkers, closed and tribal minds who don't know what they think. The delusional 5G-Covid nexus, the one between vaccines and autism, the non-existence of climate change, aliens and who knows what their hidden plot: the fake, although revealed as such, spreads like a disease and becomes a political drama. Those affected by this disease of reason publicly hold their heads held high and are reluctant to repent. Why not there? Because our democracies cannot survive the systematic false information. The American philosopher Nadler says exactly this: <<our democracies cannot survive an avalanche of hoaxes and nonsense>>. "A society that does not place a higher value on justified beliefs than on unfounded ones is a dangerous place to live." It is no longer the time to talk about tolerance or the right to believe what one wants, because our societies can no longer thrive without responsible citizens, i.e. those who care about the truth. We can no longer limit ourselves to pointing out the error, we must warn the immorality of this type of fideism, we must think of the guilt of those who choose to believe something presented to them without sufficient evidence to affirm its truthfulness. Anyone who doesn't care about the truth is guilty of inappropriate and harmful behavior for everyone. When you are about to click a "like" or other symbols that affirm a consensus, you must think that you are accomplices of bad information and accomplices of the emerging damage to society as a whole. Possible a remedy? Of course there is an antidote. We have before us an ethics of acquiring opinions, a responsibility for convictions that can protect us from acting in the dark. There are several philosophers who have indicated the right path to stay away from hasty claims and inadequate evidence. I want to mention them: Socrates first, Descartes, Clifford, Popper, they have shown us the right way to stay away from charlatans. Always Nadler but also Shapiro in their confirmation bias , claim that we are guilty of giving credit to the observations of others that give weight to our instinctive theses even on topics that are far from us as knowledge. Thanks to the richness of the history of philosophy, and to the examples of accurate and correct investigation of the truth, we can still save ourselves, we can resist, we can prevent hopes, personal advantages, beliefs from humiliating the reasonableness and the humble search for the truth of every good citizen . Umberto Eco, in 2015, railed against the "legions of imbeciles" who infested the web and as many bigger imbeciles accomplices with easy likes, but already in 1961 he portrayed the famous TV presenter Mike Bongiorno as a mediocre man who did not feel any cultural curiosity , was not ashamed of being ignorant and indeed allowed the spectators to glorify their own laziness and mental nullity. Imagine if Eco had had the opportunity to write about Striscia la Notizia. In the 1960s Ennio Flaiano went wild against the "farmed chickens" or the laughing spectators of the advertising skits. In the 1980s the historian Cipolla wrote about the "laws of stupidity" and the writers Fruttero and Lucentini complained about the "prevalence of the idiot". They were talking about state TV. By now we all seem addicted to other amenities of the most seen, read and listened to media, approved in language, where false myths are presented as gems of knowing how to live. I truly believe that it is wise to propose a rationalist attitude to masses of people who today are dragged along by waves of automatisms, habits, advantages, passions, desires, interests, dubious affiliations, prejudices, clichés, hearsay, lifestyles, cultural waste , contempt for knowledge, for study and above all for learning methods, that without them, we get on the bus of life by signing a season ticket with ignorance. Oben: ein beliebtes soziales netzwerk